daveydave

I have pretty much made a decision about my next car. But before I go into details: some background. I have had 6 cars since 1998, from 5 different manufacturers: two petrol and four diesel. I bought my current car, a Ford Focus with a small turbo diesel lump up front, just over eighteen months ago and I made a conscious decision at that point to buy a nearly-new diesel with the intention of keeping it for five or six years. Whether I keep it for that long is now in doubt. Don't get me wrong, I really like the Focus. It is quiet, comfortable and has sufficient toys and gadgets to keep my inner geek happy, but how it is powered is giving me serious food for thought. The decision to buy diesel boiled down to higher mpg/lower CO2: the EuroV engines were supposed to be clean, certainly compared to the filthy things you could buy 20 years ago, when diesel sales in the UK were way behind those on the continent. But perceptions have changed recently. The VW emissions scandal has cast ...

I'm sure that I'm not alone in my first taste of a foreign language being at school, when I started being taught French around the age of 10. And I mean being taught  French rather than learning the thing. Classrooms full of teenagers are not great places to build a working relationship with a language, but at least they force you to do it. This has been an ongoing problem for me in my post-school attempts to learn languages. I have dabbled in a few: Japanese, Turkish and Spanish - but I haven't really got anywhere near fluent. I could hold a basic conversation in Japanese, even read and write a bit - night classes helped there. I could order food and drink in Turkish, again night classes were a big help. Spanish I struggled with - no night class. But, despite mixed results, I'm keen - really keen - to avoid being one of those English speakers who relies on the fact that "everyone speaks English". I really want to be able to converse in another language and ...

Here we go then, four months of mud-slinging and associated political nonsense in the lead up to what is a very significant decision. The outcome of the EU Referendum on 23 June is arguably far more important that last year's general election. So, right on cue, here I am with one of my infrequent, meandering and opinionated posts. The EU certainly has its issues. It is a complex beast where only a select few have a clue how it all fits together and only the Parliament is directly elected. Much is made of Europe's lack of democratic accountability, but then Westminster is hardly a beacon of democratic perfection, is it? I live in a safe Labour constituency, but I don't vote Labour, so my vote has zero effect on the make up of the House of Commons. That's hardly democratic. Neither is the House of Lords, which I have supported in the past, but is now so stuffed to the gunwales that its validity is rapidly diminishing in my eyes. Yes, the EU could do with restructuring a...